James Whitney (December 27, 1921 – April 8, 1982), younger brother of John, was a filmmaker regarded as one of the great masters of abstract cinema. Several of his films are classics in the genre of visual music.

John's first works in film were 8 mm movies of a lunar eclipse which he made using a home-made telescope. In 1937-38 he spent a year in Paris, studying twelve-tone composition under Rene Leibowitz. In 1939 he returned to America and began to collaborate with his brother James on a series of abstract films. Their work, Five Film Exercises (1940-45) was awarded a prize for sound at the First International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium in 1949. In 1948 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

During the 1950s Whitney used his mechanical animation techniques to create sequences for television programs and commercials. In 1952 he directed engineering films on guided missile projects. One of his most famous works from this period was the animated title sequence from Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, which he collaborated on with the graphic designer Saul Bass.

In 1960, John founded Motion Graphics Incorporated, which used a mechanical analogue computer of his own invention to create motion picture and television title sequences and commercials. The following year, he assembled a record of the visual effects he had perfected using his device, titled simply Catalog. In 1966, IBM awarded John Whitney, Sr. its first artist-in-residence position.

By the 1970s, John Whitney had abandoned his analogue computer in favour of faster, digital processes. The pinnacle of his digital films is his 1975 work Arabesque, characterized by psychedelic, blooming colour-forms. His work during the 1980s and 1990s, benefited from faster computers and his invention of an audio-visual composition program called the Whitney-Reed RDTD (Radius-Differential Theta Differential). Works from this period such as Moondrum (1989–1995) used self-composed music and often explored mystical or Native-American themes.

James completed a number of short films over four decades, two of which required at least five years of work. James collaborated with his brother John for some of his early film work.

Between 1950 and 1955, James laboured to construct a truly astounding masterpiece, Yantra. The film was produced entirely by hand. By punching grid patterns in 5" by 7" cards with a pin, James was able to paint through these pinholes onto other 5" x 7" cards, to create images of rich complexity and give the finished work a very dynamic and flowing motion, but the film was not completed yet. It was first released as a silent film.

A very short, manipulated fragment from an early version of Yantra was shown at one of the historic Vortex Concerts in San Francisco's Morrison planetarium in early 1959. Soon after Vortex, the film acquired its soundtrack, when Jordan Belson synchronized it to an excerpt from Henk Badings’ "Cain and Abel". This did not occur at the Morrison Planetarium Vortex Concerts, contrary to popular belief (Keefer, 2008).

Analogue computer equipment developed by brother John, allowed James to complete Lapis (1966) in two years, when it might have taken seven years otherwise. James drew dot patterns again for this film, but the camera was positioned using computer control, allowing each image to be overlaid from multiple angles. In this piece, smaller circles oscillate in and out in an array of colors resembling a kaleidoscope while being accompanied by Indian sitar music. The patterns become hypnotic and trance inducing.

WFMU's one and only Heart White in these existentialistic Adult Swim ads.

I was born to a mother and father but not anymore who ushered me into this world like into a movie. Like a movie usher. But not my father so much. I learned all the great books of Europe and dreamed of reading them someday. I grew up and heard a radio. That's when I was hooked and taken to the island of lost boys. When I returned, I sought out radio again with the simple goal of helping people and complicated engineering projects.

WELCOME to the home of HEARTY WHITE. I'm Hearty White. I call myself the thinnest fat man but that's not half of what others call me. For 8 years I was the host of THE MIRACLE NUTRITION HOUR, a WEEKLY one hour spirituality and entertainment show on WVFS, 89.7, in Tallahassee, Florida.

Now I'm on WFMU in New Jersey and even though the show is called MIRACLE NUTRITION without the HOUR, it's still an hour. I feel strongly about tea making. I practice both English style and gongfu cha. Everything else I don't feel strongly about but I don't like bigotry or bullying. I purposely take measures to not be good at anything. I take it as a high compliment if people don't remember meeting me.

As far as the ARCHIVES go, they only go back to 2008. I started, I think, in 2003, but those shows are lost forever. I did the show live then, and recorded it off the air so the recordings that do exist aren't high quality. The recent shows are on the WFMU site. WFMU Hearty archive page.

Take off to the Great White North with Bob & Doug McKenzie!

Bob and Doug McKenzie are a pair of fictional Canadian brothers who hosted "Great White North", a sketch which was introduced on SCTV for the show's third season when it moved to CBC Television in 1980. Bob is played by Rick Moranis and Doug is played by Dave Thomas. The duo became a pop culture phenomenon in both the United States and Canada.

A collection of footage from the notorious married singing duo Elton & Betty White and their public access show

In the mid- to late 1980s, Elton and Betty White were highly visible Little Rock (Pulaski County) street musicians and eccentrics, recognized for their sexually explicit ukulele songs and their flamboyant wardrobe of sombreros and skimpy swimwear.

Betty White was born Betty Crandall in 1927 in Mabelvale (Pulaski County), one of seven children of the town’s postmaster and his wife. In 1946, after graduating as valedictorian of Mabelvale High School, she married air force sergeant Scotty White, with whom she had a son, Sammy. Together, they traveled the nation and the world. After returning to Arkansas, she found secretarial work with the law firm of Wright, Lindsey & Jennings, for whom Bill Clinton was then practicing. Following a diagnosis of schizophrenia, though, Betty divorced her husband and lost her job.

Elton White was born in 1958 in Dumas (Desha County). A high school basketball star, he played four years of college ball at Westark Community College (now the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith) and the University of the Ozarks. He tried out with the Atlanta Hawks, but his professional prospects were eradicated by a knee injury. He moved to Little Rock, finding work as a day laborer, until the night someone “put something in his drink,” as he often told the story, and he fell on hard times.

Elton and Betty met in 1984 at Little Rock’s Union Rescue Mission, and despite the thirty-year age difference between the white woman and the blackman, “It was love at first sight,” Betty later recalled, adding, “There was a real magnetism.” The two of them began delivering newspapers and writing music together, renting an apartment at the Albert Pike Residence Hotel. They married in 1989.

From 1986 to 1989, with the assistance of producer Jerry Colburn, they released three albums—The Best of Elton and Betty, Sex Beyond the Door, andHard Deep Sex Explosion—and recorded some 250 songs, many of them frank celebrations of their sex life, both raunchy and tender, with titles such as “A Jelly Behind Woman Blows My Mind,” “Lady, Your Breast, I Love to Caress(t),” “My Three-Feet Red-Hot Tongue Is Sweet as Sugar,” “Menopause Mama,” “Tight Blue Jeans Shows Your Thing,” and “America, We Are Sexy.” During these years, they also dabbled in politics, with Elton running for Congress and Betty for governor in 1986, and Elton for governor and Betty for the U.S. Senate in 1990.

In 1991, The Arsenio Hall Show aired a recording of the couple performing Elton’s “I’m in Love with Your Behind” in the aisles of Little Rock’s RAO Video. That same year, the couple moved to Venice Beach, California, where they began performing on the boardwalk as “The Married Couple” and launched a public-access television show, Husband and Wife Time. Theirjubilant outlandishness led to television appearances on Sally Jessy Raphael, Maury Povich, and The Daily Show, as well as articles in periodicals such as Variety, LA Weekly, and the French Agence de Presse Photographique. The Philadelphia Inquirer said of Betty, “She’s 72, a former coworker of Bill Clinton’s, wears a beaded bikini, plays the ukulele, and freely offers advice on love, marriage and sex,” and of Elton, “He’s 41, a onetime NBA prospect, wears a Speedo stuffed with socks, plays a toy keyboard, and holds the umbrella they perform behind.”

Betty White died on August 20, 2003, at the age of seventy-six. As of 2012, Elton White continues to reside in the beachfront apartment the couple once shared on Venice Beach. Elton and Betty White are the subject of a forthcoming documentary produced by Jerry Colburn and Donavan Suitt. While much of their music has become scarce, their album Hard Deep Sex Explosion is available on iTunes through Rural War Room Records.

The meta-road movie to end (or begin) a career as pop stars.

The White Room is the fourth, and final to be released, studio album by Britishhouse music group The KLF, released in March 1991. Originally scheduled to be released in 1989 as the soundtrack to a film of the same name, the album's direction was changed after both the film and the original soundtrack LP were cancelled at the last moment. Most of the tracks on the original version of the album are present in the final release, though in significantly remixed form.

The White Room was supposed to be followed by a darker, harder complementary album called The Black Room, but the latter was never released due to the KLF's retirement from the music business in 1992.

The White Room was conceived as the soundtrack to a road movie, also called The White Room, about the KLF's search for the mystical White Room that would enable them to be released from their contract with Eternity. Parts of the movie were filmed in the Sierra Nevada region of Spain, using the money that the duo, under the alias The Timelords, had made with their 1988 number one hit "Doctorin' the Tardis".[1] The soundtrack album contained pop-house versions of some of the KLF's earlier "Pure Trance" singles, as well as new songs.

The film project was fraught with difficulties and setbacks, including dwindling funds. Drummond and Cauty had released "Kylie Said to Jason" (sample(help·info)), a single from the original soundtrack, in the hopes that it could "rescue them from the jaws of bankruptcy"; it flopped commercially, however, failing to make even the UK top 100. As a consequence, The White Room film project was put on hold, and the KLF abandoned the musical direction of the soundtrack and single.[2] Neither the film nor its soundtrack were formally released, although bootleg copies of both exist.

Meanwhile, the KLF's single "What Time Is Love?", which had originally been released in 1988 and largely ignored by the public, was generating acclaim within the underground clubs of continental Europe; according to KLF Communications, "The KLF were being feted by all the 'right' DJs".[2] This prompted Drummond and Cauty to pursue the acid house tone of their Pure Trance series. A further Pure Trance release, "Last Train to Trancentral", followed.

In October 1990, the KLF launched a series of singles with an upbeat pop-house sound they dubbed "Stadium House". Songs from The White Roomsoundtrack were re-recorded with rap and more vocals (by guests labelled "Additional Communicators"), a sample-heavy pop-rock production, and crowd noise samples. The "Stadium House" versions of "What Time Is Love?" and "3 a.m. Eternal" were immediate hits, with "3 a.m. Eternal" becoming the KLF's second, and the only one under the name, number-one release. These "Stadium House" tracks made up a large part of The White Room when it was eventually released in March 1991, substantially reworked from the original soundtrack version. Aside from the singles, "Make It Rain", "Build a Fire", "Church of the KLF" and "The White Room" appeared in significantly more minimal, ambient and dub-oriented versions on the final album. "Go To Sleep" was reworked to become "Last Train To Trancentral".

Of the original mixes recorded for the film soundtrack, only "Kylie Said to Jason" (which was omitted from the final tracklist) and a version of "Build a Fire" saw legitimate commercial release.